The Call of Cthulhu

  

 H. P. Lovecraft

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

                                                

                                                The Call of Cthulhu

  

            Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a

            survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when...

            consciousness was manifest, perhaps, in shapes and forms

            long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing

            humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have

            caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters,

            mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...

                                                                        - ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

  

  

                                                I. THE HORROR IN CLAY

  

 The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability

 of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We

 live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas

 of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

 The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have

 hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together

 of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas

 of reality and of our frightful position therein, that we shall

 either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly

 light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

  

 Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of

 the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form

 transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survival in

 terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a

 bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the

 single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I

 think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse,

 like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an

 accidental piecing together of separated things - in this case

 an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I

 hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out;

 certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so

 hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to

 keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would

 have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

  

 My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-7

 with the death of my great-uncle, George Gammell Angell,

 Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages inBrownUniversity

 Providence,Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely

 known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had

 frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent

 museums so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be

 recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the

 obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been

 stricken whilst returning from theNewportboat; falling

 suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a

 nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer

 dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short

 cut from the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams

 Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder,

 but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure

 lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a

 hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the

 time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly

 I am inclined to wonder - and more than wonder.

  

 As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a

 childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with

 some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set

 of files and boxes to my quarters inBoston. Much of the

 material which I correlated will be later published by the

 American Archaeological Society, but there was one box

 which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much

 averse from showing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I

 did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the

 personal ring which the professor carried always in his

 pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but when I

 did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more

 closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the

 queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings

 and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter

 years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures?

 I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for

 this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.

 The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch

 thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of

 modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern

 in atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the vagaries of

 cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often

 reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric

 writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs

 seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much

 familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed

 in any way to identify this particular species, or even hint at

 its remotest affiliations.

  

 Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of

 evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution

 forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be

 a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form

 which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my

 somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous

 pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I

 shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy,

 tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with

 rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole

 which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure

 was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural

 background

  

 The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a

 stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent

 hand; and made no pretension to literary style. What seemed

 to be the main document was headed 'CTHULHU CULT'

 in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous

 reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was

 divided into two sections, the first of which was headed

 '1925 - Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas

 St.,Providence, R. I.,' and the second; 'Narrative of Inspector

 John R. Legrasse,121 Bienville St.,New Orleans,

 La., at 1908 A. A, S. Mtg. - Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb's

 Acct.' The other manuscript papers were all brief notes,

 some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different

 persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and

 magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliott's Atlantis and the Lost

 Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret

 societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in

 such mythological and anthropological source-books as

 Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in

 Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental

 illness and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of

 1925.

  

 The first half of the principal manuscript told a very

 peculiar tale. It appears that on1 March 1925, a thin, dark

 young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon

 Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which

 was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the

 name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognized

 him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly

 known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at

 the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the

 Fleur-de-LysBuildingnear that institution. Wilcox was a,

 precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and

 had from childhood excited attention through the strange

 stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He

 called himself 'psychically hypersensitive,' but the staid folk

 of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely

 'queer'. Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped

 gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a

 small group of aesthetes from other towns. Even theProvidence

 Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had

 found him quite hopeless.

  

 On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript,

 the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's

 archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on

 the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which

 suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle

 showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous

 freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but

 archaeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, which impressed my

 uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was

 of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his

 whole conversation, and which I have since found highly

 characteristic of him. He said, 'It is new, indeed, for I made it

 last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older

 than broodingTyreor the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-

 girdledBabylon.'

  

 It was then that he began that rambling tale which

 suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won the

 fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earth-

 quake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in

 New Englandfor some years; and Wilcox's imaginations had

 been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an

 unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks

 and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and

 sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the

 walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below

 had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation

 which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he

 attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble

 of letters 'Cthulhu fhtagn'

  

 This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which

 excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the

 sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost

 frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found

 himself working, chilled and clad only in his nightclothes,

 when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle

 blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness

 in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design.

 Many of his questions seemed highly out of place to his

 visitor especially those which tried to connect the latter with

 strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand

 the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in

 exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread

 mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor

 Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed

 ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his

 visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore

 regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript

 records daily calls of the young man, during which he related

 startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was

 always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping

 stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting

 monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable

 save gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated

 are those rendered by the letters 'Cthulhu' and 'R'lyeh.'

  

 On 23 March the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to

 appear; and inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had

 been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the

 home of his family inWaterman Street. He had cried out in

 the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and

 had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness

 and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the

 family, and from that time forward kept close watch of the

 case; calling often at theThayer Streetoffice of Dr Tobey,

 whom he learned to be in charge. The youth's febrile mind,

 apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and the doctor

 shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included

 not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but

 touched wildly on a gigantic thing 'miles high' which walked

 or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object

 but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr Tobey,

 convinced the professor that it must be identical with the

 nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream

 -sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was

 invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into

 lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly

 above normal; but the whole condition was otherwise such as

 to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.

  

 On 2 April at about3 P.M.every trace of Wilcox's malady

 suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find

 himself at home and completely ignorant of what had

 happened in dream or reality since the night of 22 March.

 Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his

 quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no

 further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had

 vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of

 his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant

 accounts of thoroughly usual visions.

  

 Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references

 to certain of the scattered notes gave me much material for

 thought - so much, in fact, that only the ingrained

 scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my

 continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were

 those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering

 the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his

 strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly

 instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst

 nearly all the friends whom he could question without

 impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and

 the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The

 reception of his request seems to have been varied; but he

 must at the very least, have received more responses than

 any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary.

 This original correspondence was not preserved but his

 notes formed a thorough and really significant digest.

 Average people in society and business -New England's

 traditional 'salt of the earth' - gave an almost completely

 negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless

 nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always

 between 23 March and 2 April - the period of young Wilcox's

 delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though

 four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of

 strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned a

 dread of something abnormal.

  

 It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers

 came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had

 they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their

 original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked

 leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in

 corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is

 why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognizant of

 old data which my uncle had possessed, had been

 imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from

 aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From 28 February to 2 April

 a large proportion of the dreams being immeasurable the stronger

 during the period of the sculptor's delirium. Over a fourth of

 those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds

 not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and

 some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic

 nameless thing visible towards the last. One case, which the

 note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a

 widely known architect with leanings towards theosophy

 and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young

 Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later after

 incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen

 of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead

 of merely by number, I should have attempted some

 corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I

 succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these, however,

 bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the

 objects of the professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did

 this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach

 them.

  

 The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases

 of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the given period.

 Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for

 the number of extracts was tremendous, and the sources

 scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide

 inLondon, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window

 after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the

 editor of a paper inSouth America, where a fanatic deduces a

 dire future from visions he has seen. A dispatch from

 Californiadescribes a theosophist colony as donning white

 robes en masse for some 'glorious fulfilment' which never

 arrives, whilst items fromIndiaspeak guardedly of serious

 native unrest towards the end of March. Voodoo orgies

 multiply inHaiti, and African outposts report ominous

 mutterings. American officers in thePhilippinesfind certain

 tribes bothersome about this time, andNew Yorkpolicemen

 are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of 22-23

 March The west ofIreland, too, is full of wild rumour and

 legendry and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Boonot

 hangs a blasphemous Dream Landscape in theParisspring

 salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in

 insane asylums that only a miracle can have stopped the

 medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and

 drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings,

 all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous

 rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then

 convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older

 matters mentioned by the professor.

  

                        II. THE TALE OF INSPECTOR LEGRASSE

  

 The old matters which had made the sculptor's dream and

 bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of

 the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it

 appears Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of

 the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown

 hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can

 be rendered only as 'Cthulhu'; and all this in so stirring and

 horrible a connection that it is small wonder he pursued

 young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.

  

 This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen

 years before when the American Archaeological Society

 held its annual meeting inSt Louis. Professor Angell, as

 befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a

 prominent part in all the deliberations, and was one of the

 first to be approached by the several outsiders who took

 advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct

 answering and problems for expert solution.

  

 The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus

 of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking

 middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from

 New Orleansfor certain special information unobtainable

 from any local source. His name was John Raymond

 Legrasse, and he was by profession an inspector of police

 With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque,

 repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose

 origin he was at a loss to determine.

  

 It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the

 least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for

 enlightenment was prompted by purely professional

 considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was,

 had been captured some months before in the wooden

 swamps south ofNew Orleansduring a raid on a supposed

 voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites

 connected with it, that the police could not but realize that

 they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them,

 and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the

 African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic

 and unbelieveable tales extorted from the captured

 members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the

 anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might

 help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track

 down the cult to its fountain-head.

  

 Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the

 sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing

 had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into

 a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding

 around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter

 strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so

 potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognized

 school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet

 centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its

 dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.

  

 The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to

 man for close and careful study, was between seven and

 eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship.

 It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline,

 but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass

 of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws

 on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This

 thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural

 malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence,

 and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or

 pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips

 of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat

 occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the

 doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge

 and extended a quarter of the way down towards the

 bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent

 forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the

 backs of huge fore-paws which clasped the croucher's

 elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally

 lifelike, and the more subtly fearful because its source was

 so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable

 age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it show with

 any known type of art belonging to civilization's youth - or

 indeed to any other time.

  

 Totally separate and apart, its very material was a

 mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its

 golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled

 nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters

 along the base were equally baffling; and no member

 present, despite a representation of half the world's expert

 learning in this field, could form the least notion of even

 their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and

 material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct

 from mankind as we know it; something frightfully

 suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our

 world and our conceptions have no part.

  

 And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and

 confessed defeat at the inspector's problem, there was one

 man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre

 familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who

 presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew.

 This person was the late William Channing Webb, professor

 of anthropology inPrincetonUniversity, and an explorer of

 no slight note.

  

 Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before,

 in a tour ofGreenlandandIcelandin search of some

 Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst

 high up on theWest Greenlandcoast had encountered a

 singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a

 curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate

 bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which

 other Eskimos knew little, and which they mentioned only

 with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly

 ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides

 nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer

 hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or

 tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful

 phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing

 the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But

 just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult

 had cherished, and around which they danced when the

 aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor

 stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous

 picture and some cryptic writing. And as far as he could tell,

 it was rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial

 thing now lying before the meeting.

  

 These data, received with suspense and astonishment by

 the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector

 Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with

 questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the

 swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought

 the professor to remember as best he might the syllables

 taken down amongst the diabolist Eskimos. There then

 followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment

 of really awed silence when both detective and scientist

 agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two

 hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in

 substance, both the Eskimo wizards and theLouisiana

 swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something

 very like this - the word-divisions being guessed at

 from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud;

  

    'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.'

  

 Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for

 several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him

 what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This

 text, as given, ran something like this:

  

   'In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.'

  

 And now, in response to a general urgent demand, Inspector

 Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience

 with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could

 see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of

 the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and

 disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination

 among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least

 expected to possess it.

  

 On 1 November 1907, there had come to New Orleans

 police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon

 country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive

 but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the

 grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen

 upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but

 voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known;

 and some of their women and children had disappeared

 since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant

 beating far within the black haunted woods where no

 dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing

 screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames;

 and, the frightened messenger added, the people could

 stand it no more.

  

 So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an

 automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the

 shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable

 road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence

 through the terrible cypress woods where day never came.

 Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss

 beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or

 fragments of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid

 habitation a depression which every malformed tree and

 every fungous islet combined to create. At length the

 squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in

 sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the

 group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms

 was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling

 shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted.

 A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale

 undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night.

 Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed

 squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch

 towards the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector

 Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided

 into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever

 trod before.

  

 The region now entered by the police was one of

 traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and

 untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden

 lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge,

 formless white polypus thing with luminous eyes; and

 squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of

 caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said

 it had been there before D'lberville, before La Salle, before

 the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and

 birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was

 to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to

 keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the

 merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was

 bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship

 had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds

 and incidents.

  

 Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises

 heard by Legrasse's men as they ploughed on through the

 black morass towards the red glare and the muffled tom-

 toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal

 qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one

 when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and

 orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to demoniac

 heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and

 reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential

 tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less

 organized ululations would cease, and from what seemed a

 well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in singsong

 chant that hideous phrase or ritual:

  

 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.'

  

 Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees

 were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself.

 Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into

 a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately

 deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the

 face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly

 hypnotized with horror.

 In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of

 perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On

 this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of

 human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola

 could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were

 braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous

 ringshaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by

 occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite

 monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which,

 incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven

 statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular

 intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head

 downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters

 who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of

 worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the

 mass motion being from left to right in endless bacchanale

 between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

  

 It may have been only imagination and it may have been

 only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable

 Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the

 ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the

 wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D.

 Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to

hint of the

 faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes

 and mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees - but

 I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.

  

 Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively

 brief duration. Duty came first; and although there

 must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the

 throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged

 determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the

 resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild

 blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made;

 but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven

 sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall

 into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the

 worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were

 carried away on improvised stretchers by their

 fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was

 carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.

  

 Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain

 and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very

 low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most

 were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattos,

 largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape

 Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the

 heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked

 it became manifest that something far deeper and older

 than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant

 as they were, the creatures held with suprising consistency

 to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

  

 They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who

 lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the

 young world out of the sky. These Old Ones were gone

 now inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead

 bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first man,

 who formed a cult which had never died. This was that

 cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and

 always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark

 places all over the world until the time when the great

 priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of

 R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth

 again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the

 stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be

 waiting to liberate him.

  

 Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret

 which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not

 absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for

 shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these

 were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old

 Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might

 say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one

 could read the old writing now, but things were told by word

 of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret - that was

 never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only

 this: 'In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.'

  

 Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be

 hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions.

 All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the

 killing had been done by Black-winged Ones which had

 come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the

 haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent

 account could ever be gained. What the police did extract

 came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named

 Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and

 talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of

 China.

  

 Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled

 the speculations of theosophists and made man and the

 world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been

 aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had

 had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless

 Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean

 stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of

 time before man came, but there were arts which could

 revive Them when the stars had come round again to the

 right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed,

 come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images

 with Them.

  

 These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not

 composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape

 for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? - but that

 shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right,

 They could plunge from world to world through the sky;

 but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But

 although They no longer lived, They would never really

 die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of

 R'lyeh preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a

 glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might

 once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force

 from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The

 spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented

 Them from making an initial move, and They could only

 lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions

 of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the

 universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted

 thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When,

 after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old

 Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their

 dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the

 fleshy minds of mammals.

  

 Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult

 around small idols which the Great Ones showed them;

 idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would

 never die till the stars came right again, and the secret

 priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive

 His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would

 be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as

 the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and

 evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men

 shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the

 liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout

 and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth

  

 would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

 Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the

 memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy

 of their return.

  

 In the elder time chosen men had talked with the

 entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had

 happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its monoliths

 and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep

 waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not

 even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse.

 But memory never died, and high priests said that the city

 would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of

 the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and

 full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten

 sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much.

 He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or

 subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old

 Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he

 said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts

 of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden

 and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult,

 and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book

 had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen

 said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of

 the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might

 read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

  

            That is not dead which can eternal lie,

            And with strange aeons even death may die.

  

 Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered,

 had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the

 cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that

 it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University

 could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the

 detective had come to the highest authorities in the

 country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of

 Professor Webb.

  

 The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by

 Legrasse's tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is

 echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who

 attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal

 publication of the society. Caution is the first care of those

 accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture.

 Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb,

 but at the latter's death it was returned to him and

 remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago.

 It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the

 dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.

  

 That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I

 did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon

 hearing after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of

 the cult, of a sensitive young man, who had dreamed not

 only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-

 found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come

 in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the

 formula uttered alike by Eskimo diabolists and mongrel

 Louisianans? Professor Angell's instant start on an

 investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently

 natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of

 having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of

 having invented a series of dreams to heighten and

 continue the mystery at my uncle's expense. The dream-

 narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of

 course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my

 mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to

 adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So,

 after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and

 correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes

 with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to

 Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I

 thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and

 aged man.

  

 Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in

 Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of

 seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its

 stuccoed front amidst the lovely Colonial houses on the

 ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest

 Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his

 rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered

 about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He

 will, I believe, be heard from some time as one of the great

 decadents; for he has crystallized in clay and will one day

 mirror in marble those nightmares and fantasia which

 Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith

 makes visible in verse and in painting.

  

 Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned

 languidly at my knock and asked me my business without

 rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some

 interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing

 his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for

 the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard,

 but sought with some subtlety to draw him out.

  

 In a short time I became convinced of his absolute

 sincerity for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none

 could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had

 influenced his art profoundly, and he showed me a morbid

 statue whose contours almost made me shake with the

 potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having

 seen the original of this thing except in his own dream

 bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves in-

 sensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape

 he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing

 of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle's relentless

 catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I

 strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have

 received the weird impressions.

  

 He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion;

 making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean

 city of slimy green stone - whose geometry, he oddly said, was

 all wrong - and hear with frightened expectancy the

 ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: 'Cthulhu

 fhtagn, Cthulhu fhtagn.'

  

 These words had formed part of that dread ritual which

 told of dead Cthulhu's dream-vigil in his stone vault at

 R'lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs.

 Wilcox, I was sure, had. heard of the cult in some casual

 way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his

 equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its

 sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression

 in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now

 beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a

 very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly

 affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like;

 but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and

 his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all

 the success his talent promises.

  

 The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and

 at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into

 its origin and connections. I visited New Orleans, talked

 with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party,

 saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the

 mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately,

 had been dead for some years. What I now heard

 so graphically at first hand, though it was really no more

 than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written,

 excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a

 very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose

 discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My

 attitude was still one of absolute materialism as I wish it still

 were, and I discounted with a most inexplicable perversity

 the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected

 by Professor Angell.

  

 One thing which I began to suspect, and which I now fear

 I know, is that my uncle's death was far from natural. He fell

 on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront

 swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a

 negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine

 pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be

 surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as

 ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and

 beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone;

 but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead.

 Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering

 the sculptor's data have come to sinister ears? I

 think Professor Angel1 died because he knew too much, or

 because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go

 as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

  

                        III. THE MADNESS FROM THE SEA

  

 If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total

 effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye

 on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on

 which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of

 my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian

 journal, Sydney Bulletin for 18 April 1925. It had escaped

 even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its

 issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle's

 research.

  

 I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor

 Angell called the 'Cthulhu Cult,' and was visiting a

 learned friend of Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a

 local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one

 day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage

 shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught

 by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath

 the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for

 my friend has tide affiliations in all conceivable foreign

 parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous

 stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had

 found in the swamp.

  

 Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I

 scanned the item in detail, and was disappointed to find it

 of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was

 of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I

 carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as

 follows:

  

                        MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA

  

     Vigilant Arrives with Helpless Armed New Zealand

     Yacht in Tow. One Survivor and Dead Man Found

     Aboard. Tale of Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.

     Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of Strange Experi-

     ence. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to

     Follow.

  

 The Morrison Co's freighter Vigilant, bound from

 Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling

 Harbour having in tow the battled and disabled but

 heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin NZ, which

 was sighted 12 April in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude

 152° 17', with one living and one dead man aboard.

  

 The Vigilant left Valparaiso 25 March, and on 2 April was

 driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally

 heavy storms and monster waves. On 12 April the derelict

 was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found

 upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious

 condition and one man who had evidently been dead for

 more than a week.

  

 The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of

 unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose

 nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society,

 and the Museum in College Street all profess complete

 bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin

 of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.

  

 This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly

 strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen,

 a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate

 of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed

 for Callao 20 February, with a complement of eleven men.

  

 The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south

 of her course by the great storm of 1 March, and on 22

 March, in S. Latitude 49º 51', W. Longitude 128º 34',

 encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking

 crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered

 peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon

 the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning

 upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass

 cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment.

  

 The Emma's men showed fight, says the survivor, and

 though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the

 waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and

 board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht's

 deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being

 slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and

 desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.

  

 Three of Emma's men, including Capt. Collins and First

 Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under

 Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured

 yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any

 reason for their ordering back had existed.

  

 The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small

 island, although none is known to exist in that part of the

 ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though

 Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story and

 speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm.

  

 Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht

 and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm

 of 2 April.

  

 From that time till his rescue on the 12th, the man

 remembers little, and he does not even recall when William

 Briden, his companion, died. Briden's death reveals no

 apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or

 exposure.

  

 Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well

 known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation

 along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of

 half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the

 woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great

 haste just after the storm and earth tremors of 1 March.

  

 Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew

 an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober

 and worthy man.

  

 The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole

 matter, beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be

 made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has

 done hitherto.

  

 This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image;

 but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were

 new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence

 that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What

 motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as

 they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the

 unknown island on which six of the Emma's crew had died,

 and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What

 had the vice-admiralty's investigation brought out, and what

 was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most

 marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage

 of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable

 significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted

 by my uncle?

  

 1 March - our 28 February according to the International

 Date Line - the earthquake and storm had come. From

 Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly

 forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of

 the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange,

 dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in

 his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. 23 March the crew

 of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men

 dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed

 a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant

 monster's malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad

 and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what

 of this storm of 2 April - the date on which all dreams of the

 dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the

 bondage of strange fever? What of all this - and of those hints

 of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their

 coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams?

 Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's

 power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone,

 for in some way the second of April had put a stop to

 whatever monstrous menace had begun its seige of mankind's

 soul.

  

 That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and

 arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San

 Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin: where,

 however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-

 members who had lingered in the old sea taverns.

 Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention;

 though there was vague talk about one inland trip these

 mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red

 flame were noted on the distant hills.

  

 In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with

 yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive

 questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage

 in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in

 Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no

 more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they

 could do was to give me his Oslo address.

  

 After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with

 seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw

 the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, in Circular

 Quay at Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its

 noncommittal bulk. The crouching image with its

 cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and

 hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at

 Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a

 thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the

 same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly

 strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse's

 smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had

 found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world

 held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of

 what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great

 Ones: 'They had come from the stars, and had brought

 Their images with Them.'

  

 Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never

 before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo.

 Sailing for London, I re-embarked at once for the Norwegian

 capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in

 the shadow of the Egeberg.

  

 Johansen's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of

 King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo

 during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as

 'Christiania.' I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked

 with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient

 building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black

 answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment

 when she told me in halting English that Gustaf

 Johansen was no more.

  

 He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the

 doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no

 more than he had told the public, but had left a long

 manuscript - of 'technical matters' as he said - written in

 English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of

 casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near

 the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic

 window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once

 helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach

 him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the

 end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.

  

 I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will

 never leave me till I, too, am at rest; 'accidentally' or

 otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connection with

 her husband's 'technical matters' was sufficient to entitle me

 to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to

 read it on the London boat.

  

 It was a simple, rambling thing - a naïve sailor's effort at a

 postfacto diary - and strove to recall day by day that last

 awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in

 all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist

 enough to show why the sound of the water against the

 vessel's sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped

 my ears with cotton.

  

 Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though

 he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly

 again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind

 life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed

 blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea,

 known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to

 loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall

 heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.

  

 Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-

 admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on 20

 February, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born

 tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the

 horrors that filled men's dreams. Once more under control,

 the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert

 on 22 March, and I could feel the mate's regret as he wrote of

 her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on

 the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some

 peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their

 destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shows ingenuous

 wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against

 his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry.

 Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht

 under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone

 pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47º 9', W.

 Longitude 126º 43', come upon a coastline of mingled mud,

 ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing

 less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror-

 the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in

 measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome

 shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great

 Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and

 sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts

 that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called

 imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of

 liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not

 suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!

  

 I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous

 monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was

 buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of

 the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost

 wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were

 awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of

 elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance

 that it was nothing of this or any sane planet. Awe at the

 unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the

 dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the

 stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs

 with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is

 poignantly visible in every line of the mate's frightened

 description.

  

 Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen

 achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the

 city; for instead of describing any definite structure or

 building, he dwells only on the broad impressions of vast

 angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to belong to

 anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with

 horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about

 angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of

 his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the

 dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and

 loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from

 ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst

 gazing at the terrible reality.

  

 Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on

 this monstrous acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over

 titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal

 staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when

 viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out from this

 sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense

 lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven

 rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first

 showed convexity.

  

 Something very like fright had come over all the explorers

 before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed

 was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn

 of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they

 searched - vainly, as it proved - for some portable souvenir

 to bear away.

  

 It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot

 of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest

 followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved

 door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was,

 Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that

 it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and

 jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it

 lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-

 door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place

 was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the

 ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of

 everything else seemed fantasmally variable.

  

 Briden pushed at the stone in several places without

 result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the

 edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed

 interminably along the grotesque stone moulding - that is,

 one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all

 horizontal - and the men wondered how any door in the

 universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the

 acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they

 saw that it was balanced.

  

 Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or

 along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone

 watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven

 portal. In this fantasy of prismatic distortion it moved

 anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of

 matter and perspective seemed upset.

  

 The aperture was black with a darkness almost material.

 That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it

 obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been

 revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its

 aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it

 slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping

 membranous wings. The odour arising from the newly

 opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-

 eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound

 down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening

 still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly

 squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black

 doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of

 madness.

  

 Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he

 wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he

 thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant.

 The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for

 such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such

 eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic

 order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder

 that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor

 Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The

 Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had

 awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and

 what an age-old cult had failed to do by designs, a band of

 innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of

 years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for

 delight.

  

 Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before

 anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the

 universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera and Angstrom.

 Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly

 over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and

 Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of

 masonry which shouldn't have been there; an angle which

 was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden

 and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for

 the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the

 slimy stones and hesitated, floundering at the edge of the

 water.

  

 Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite

 the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of

 only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between

 wheels and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst

 the distorted horrors of the indescribable scene, she began to

 chum the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that

 charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the

 stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the

 fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied

 Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and

 began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic

 potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing at

 intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst

 Johansen was wandering deliriously.

  

 But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the

 Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully

 up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the

 engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed

 the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the

 noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher

 the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the

 pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the

 stern of a demon galleon. The awful squid-head with

 writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy

 yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly.

  

 There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy

 nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand

 opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put

 on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid

 and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a

 venomous seething astern; where - God in heaven! - the

 scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was

 nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its

 distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus

 from its mounting steam.

  

 That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the

 idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for

 himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to

 navigate after the first bold flight; for the reaction had taken

 something out of his soul. Then came the storm of 2 April,

 and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There

 is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity,

 of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet's tail,

 and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from

 the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating

 chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green,

 bat-winged mucking imps of Tartarus.

  

 Out of that dream came rescue - the Vigilant the vice-

 admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage

 back home to the old house by the Egeberg He could not tell

 -they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew

 before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would

 be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.

  

 That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in

 the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor

 Angell. With it shall go this record of mine - this test of my

 own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may

 never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that

 the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring

 and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to

 me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went,

 as poor Johansen went, so shall I go. I know too much, and

 the cult still lives.

  

 Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of

 stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His

 accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over

 the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still

 bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in

 lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking

 whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now

 be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end?

 What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.

 Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay

 spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come -

 but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not

 survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution

 before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.